Are You Being Stalked via Your Fitness Monitor?

In our October 2017 MicroOutlook, I wrote about the risks of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the accompanying management challenges to keep your organization safe. Here’s a fresh example.

This week news came out about an unexpected side effect of many popular Strava-enabled fitness trackers. These devices interface to your smartphone and compile activity data and give you all sorts of reporting. Sounds good, right? Except the latest version includes a heat map which gets uploaded to the manufacturer who makes it available on the Internet. And it shows the aggregated routes of all its users. Social media users quickly realized that this info could be used to figure out where Western military camps in the Middle East are located. Fitness conscious soldiers jogging about the bases’ perimeters were building up nice neat traces on the heat maps over time.

Remember, IoT presents many security challenges. You can’t simply say ‘It’s just a temperature sensor’ or ‘it’s just a fitness tracker’. Any device that gathers data and connects to either the Internet or a network has to be scrutinized before it’s deployed. And you have to monitor your network to make sure employees aren’t bringing in their own devices and attaching them to computers or data jacks.

If your organization needs help with managing IoT or security, contact us for assistance.